372, rue Ste-Catherine O, #403
January 8 to February 5, 2011
By Greg Stone
"This one here is a type of Pollock." Jana Winderen puts her hand up to stop me from talking so she can hear the noises coming from the speakers. "Quite a powerful fish. Its hunting. You hear that RRRrrrruuu RRRrrruuuuuu sound? Yeah, they're following small fish." I’m trying to hear the hunting. Or the small fish. But I pretty much just hear moving water. But in my defense, Ms. Winderen has a bit more experience than I do with this kind of thing. Hailing from Oslo, Norway, Jana Winderen is an internationally acclaimed sound artist, producer, curator, and director whose two installations, Energy Field and Shuffling Around in the Shallows, now showing at Galerie B-312, showcase her recent underwater and sub-glacial recordings from around the world. Ms. Winderen has spent the past few years experimenting with hydrophones. microphones that are designed to pick up underwater sounds. She has collected recordings from pretty much everywhere, from rivers in Thailand to glaciers in Greenland.
Hear an excerpt from Energy Field by Jana Winderen
The space at Galerie B-312 is split into two rooms. The first room houses Energy Field. Originally intended as a record release on UK label Touch, Energy Field now exhibits as an installation piece. Nine speakers set up in a 3 x 3 square on stands at ear-level, emit sounds Ms. Winderen recorded at Norwegian fjords, glaciers on the west coast of Greenland, and in the Barents Sea north of Norway. Mounted on the far wall is a jumble of cables and processors, and a screen displaying still images of fjord ice fields. Ms. Winderen says that she doesn't like to hide anything or put things into boxes, so there is no mystery involved. For this project, Ms. Winderen's methods included dropping a microphone, attached to a long cable, down massive crevices in glaciers, recording sounds that don't exist on the surface. "I just had an idea. I really wanted to go to Greenland because I've heard about the sounds of the icebergs as they move past. So I bought a ticket and I went there with my recording equipment," she tells me in her yogurt-y Norwegian accent. "I went up to where the inland ice reaches the bay and recorded avalanches of that one, and underwater of the avalanches. It's mostly different recordings from up to 90 metres below the surface." The recording starts at the surface with the groaning of birds and dogs, and eventually reaches the depths of the glacier. The resulting sound is definitely not of this world. A very heavy reverb background noise is sparsely accented by dripping and steadily flowing water, something that sounds like crickets chirping, and, my favourite part, the creaking of the glaciers slowly rubbing against each other. There's so much tension in this noise, it's painful. It might be the best way to suggest the immensity of these enormous ice cubes. So why glaciers?
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| Energy Field, Jana Winderen at Galerie B-312. Photo by Greg Stone |
"I wanted to work with the water cycles, and how water exists in different phases. So I went to Greenland to get the melting of the ice, and it became much more of a story of [the water] going from land through the ice, and down to the water... My main interest is the soundscapes underwater." Ms. Winderen's focus for this project was to bring to the surface (no pun intended) sounds that have never been heard before. Sounds we don't have up here. Sounds that you don’t even believe are natural. And if that is her focus, she has succeeded. But back to the hunting Pollocks.
The second, adjacent room, at the gallery houses Shuffling Around in the Shallows, an installation dedicated to the communication between underwater creatures. Like Energy Field, Shuffling Around in the Shallows focuses on the audio. Four speakers set up in a square face inwards, creating a kind of surround-sound effect. Again, a mish-mash of cables mounted on the wall. Nothing to hide here. Beside this, there is a screen showing a spectrogram which displays the frequencies of the sounds from her recordings. "Different species have different frequencies they work in, so they can always interact with each other. I'm now starting to look more into that aspect." She explains to me how animals, both underwater and on land, communicate with each other on particular frequencies. One species will choose a certain frequency so that they can communicate uninterrupted, while other species will do the same thing, but on a different frequency. This communicating helps animals with things like hunting and mating. Ok, I know this is starting to sound like a BBC documentary, but we’re getting back to the art.
One of the most interesting aspects of Ms. Winderen's work is the methods she uses to get her recordings. For example, to record the Pollocks hunting small fish, Ms. Winderen put hydrophones in the shallows of a fjord and waited for the tides to come in. The local fishermen helped her identify the species she was working with. When I describe her work like that, Ms. Winderen's art comes across almost like scientific research. In fact, marine biologists and other scientists have been involved with her work in the past. So what sets this piece of art apart from science? Ms. Winderen explains to me that there is a lot of research being done on underwater communication, but most of it deals with whales. "Not so much on fish. I didn't learn in school that fish were communicating. [I wanted] to find out how important audio is for the creatures in the ocean, and how ignorant we are of that. We're just sound polluting the ocean with both motorized boats and also with seismic testing for oil drilling. This is crucially bad for some species." She explains how by filling the oceans with sound pollution, people are interrupting the communication of these fish. Without communication, they can't mate. Without mating, fish populations decrease, and the indigenous populations that rely on these fish will eventually suffer. After hearing all of this, I listen to the installation again and it sounds totally different.
Ms. Winderen is clearly very passionate about her style of art. And she is enthusiastic to let others learn her ways. On January 10th and 11th, Ms. Winderen and Galerie B-312 held a 2-day workshop on the art of recording underwater sounds. Ms. Winderen walked 10 people through the equipment needed to record underwater, and then took them all out in a boat on the St. Lawrence river with all the recording equipment and taught everyone how to record sounds from the river. How cool is that? And it seems like Ms. Winderen was able to find some beauty in the sounds of the St. Lawrence; soon after I left her, and despite her very tight schedule, she was heading back out to the river. "Yeah, it sounded brilliant. You know I really started thinking about it, this river. I had a really solid, good recording, so I want to go back."
Whether Ms. Winderen wants it or not, her subjects connect her to the climate change debate. Take, for example, the story connected to her previous recording Noisiest Guys on the Planet, released on Touch records. Ms. Winderen was out on the coast of Norway, recording the crackling sounds of shrimp with fellow artist Chris Watson. At first, Ms. Winderen and Mr. Watson thought that the shrimp might be snapping shrimp, a species of shrimp that use a snapping sound to stun their prey, but quickly realized that snapping shrimp usually live further south, and wouldn't normally survive in the icy waters of the Norwegian coast.
"And I got this email from a journalist in Germany asking me, 'Can you confirm that snapping shrimp are moving north because of climate change?' And I never said that. I said that it can't be them making this sound because we are too far north, and they live further south."
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| Energy Field, Jana Winderen at Galerie B-312. Photo by Greg Stone |
Despite this, the German journalist went to the Polar Institute in Norway and asked the scientists there if these snapping shrimp could exist in Norwegian waters. So, being good scientists, they did some research and found that the snapping shrimp had in fact migrated north, and that Ms. Winderen had in fact been recording this species. Climate change or not, this was a significant scientific discovery.
Like it or not, any artist working with glaciers will be automatically connected to the issue of climate change. And Ms. Winderen goes about it brilliantly. "Everybody has their eyes on Greenland at the moment. But I don’t want it to be predominantly about the climate change issues, it’s generally really about the sounds underwater that we're so ignorant about." Ms. Winderen lets her art speak for itself. Sure, it will be interpreted in connection to climate change. It was one of my first thoughts when I walked into the gallery. It prompted the German journalist to look deeper. And for Ms. Winderen, it's the perfect role for her art. "If [my work] can start somebody looking for a second time, then I feel it's really worthwhile. And I think in this way, you know, I'm very happy if my work can start this kind of process. It's wonderful."
